A top-tier research professional's hand-picked selection of documents from academe, corporations, government agencies (including the Congressional Research Service), interest groups, NGOs, professional societies, research institutes, think tanks, trade associations, and more.

Across OECD countries, almost one in five students does not reach a basic minimum level of skills to function in society, and roughly the same proportion of students drops out of school before completing their secondary education. Disadvantaged students are twice as likely as their advantaged peers to be poor performers, implying that personal or social circumstances are obstacles to achieving their potential. As the recent Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) found, having poor skills in literacy and numeracy limits people’s access to better-paying and more rewarding jobs. By contrast, among the OECD countries with the largest expansion of university-level education over the past few decades, most still see rising earnings differentials for tertiary graduates, which suggests that the increase in the number of “knowledge workers” has not led to a decrease in their pay, as was the case for low-skilled workers. Skilled individuals are also more likely to volunteer, to see themselves as actors, rather than objects, in the political process, to report good health, and to trust others; and trust is the foundation on which democracies are built (OECD 2013a).

As the benefits – both social and economic – for the highly skilled keep rising, the economic and social penalties for individuals without adequate skills are becoming more severe. Providing all individuals with the knowledge and skills to participate fully in our economies and societies, and to collaborate, compete and connect, is now a policy imperative. This has profound implications for teachers, students and for the leadership of schools and education systems. The most advanced education systems now set ambitious goals for all students, with a clear focus on equity, and are clear about what students should be able to do. They also equip their teachers with the pedagogic skills that have been proven effective and with enough autonomy so that teachers can use their own creativity in determining the content and instruction they need to provide to their students.

The Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas was delivered, by the OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, to the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos on Friday, May 17, 2013. The document is composed of two parts: the Analytical Report, which explains the reasons that lead society to worry about drug consumption and to try to control its effects on human health and the Scenarios Report, an examination of the paths that the phenomenon could take in the coming years in the region.

For his part, the CICAD Chair and Minister of Public Security of Costa Rica, Mario Zamora Cordero, closed the session by stating that “more judges, more prosecutors and more police will mean more people arrested but not fewer crimes committed. In this Report we have the key to how to address the issue of violence associated with drug use.”

The Organization of American States (OAS), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) today presented the First Report on International Migration in the Americas, a joint effort by the three organizations to make rigorous and current technical information on the phenomenon of international migration available to the international community.

This First Report analyzes the migration situation in the nine countries of the Americas that participated in the first phase of the Continuous Reporting System on Labour Migration for the Americas (SICREMI): Argentina, Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Uruguay. Nine more countries will participate in the second phase, at the end of which a report will be published in 2012: Barbados, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Panama, Peru, and Dominican Republic.

Among other facts, the report highlights that, between 2003 and 2009, nearly 950,000 people per year emigrated from the Americas to countries of the OECD; of this total, nearly half went to the United States, and a fourth to Spain. Furthermore, it specifies that “legal migration levels from the Americas to OECD destination countries have generally maintained themselves in the midst of the most severe economic crisis of the post-war years with the exception of migration levels to Spain and the United States.” Recent developments in remittance flows, the labor market situation of emigrants from countries in the Americas in recent years, and asylum seekers in the Americas are some of the other subjects contained in the report.